The day you got the thing, you felt wonderful.
Maybe it was the promotion, the house, the number in the account, the finish line of a marathon, the business finally turning a profit. You'd pictured that day for years. And when it arrived, the feeling was real: a lift, a glow, a sense of having done it. You celebrated. People congratulated you.
By the following week, it had mostly gone. Not in a dramatic way. It just faded, the way a holiday tan fades, until one morning you noticed that you felt exactly as you had before. And somewhere in your mind, already, a new goal had quietly taken its place. When I get that, then I'll really be happy.
Why doesn't achieving your goals make you happy?
Achieving goals rarely brings lasting happiness because happiness is a state, and states can't be bought with results. The lift after a win is real but short. Then the mind moves the finish line and postpones happiness again, to the next goal. The happiness you were chasing was never waiting at the end. It was available underneath all along.
That's not an argument against goals. It's an argument against making your happiness wait for them.
Aren't goals a good thing?
Yes, when they're used for what they're good at.
For many years, goal setting was a big part of my own life and of the work I did with people. And it works. Setting goals gives you clarity and direction. It makes daily decisions easier. It focuses your effort, and you tend to get more of what you focus on. Done well, goal setting can genuinely support the life you want to create.
But it's worth asking a simple question: why are you setting this goal? For most people, if they follow the answer far enough down, it ends up in the same place. Because when I achieve it, I'll be successful, and when I'm successful, I'll be happy.
That's where it goes wrong.
Why does the happiness never last?
Because the goal was never the source of it.
Happiness is a state. It's a feeling that arises inside you, not a possession you acquire. And yet most of us are willing to postpone it, sometimes for decades, until we've met a list of conditions we've adopted about when it's acceptable to feel good. First the career. Then the relationship. Then the money. Then the house. Only then, we tell ourselves, will it be all right to be happy.
So we reach a goal, and some happiness does follow. But it lasts a minute, a day, a week at most, and then we're off to the next one, postponing happiness again to the next milestone. It's a race whose finish line keeps moving the moment you get near it.
And the cost isn't only the happiness you postpone. It's the life you walk past while you're postponing it. The ordinary Tuesday evenings. The years your children are small. The friendships that fade because there's always something more urgent. Many people who reach their big goals look back and realise that the best years happened while they were too busy looking ahead to notice them.
Imagine a sculptor trying to reveal a statue by gluing on more marble. Every goal achieved to earn happiness is another piece glued on. The structure gets more impressive. The figure underneath, the person who could feel happy right now, gets further from view. If you've felt that hollowness after success, high achiever feeling empty goes deeper into it, and so does feeling stuck despite success.
What if it works the other way round?
This is the part that changed my life.
At some point I noticed that I'd been using discontent as my motivation strategy. I'd make myself unhappy with where I was, so I'd work hard to get somewhere else. It worked, in the sense that I achieved things. It didn't work, in the sense that I was never where I wanted to be.
So I tried the opposite. I stopped using dissatisfaction as fuel, and started following my inner joy wherever it wanted to take me. I allowed myself to be not childish but childlike: open, curious, glad to be alive, enjoying the feeling rather than waiting for permission to have it.
My life changed enormously after that. And here's the surprise: it didn't make me less successful. If anything, happiness brought results faster than any goal I'd ever set. Today I do what I love. I live from my heart. That was the goal behind all my other goals anyway. I just wanted my life to be meaningful, and to feel happy, vibrant and content in my soul.
You can't set a goal for that and achieve it later. Those aren't things you can buy or acquire. They're states, and it's rather strange to postpone them to some future date when they're available now.
I still enjoy achieving things. I still make plans and see them through. The difference is that my happiness no longer waits for the result. It comes with me into the work, and the work tends to go better for it.
How can I notice where I'm postponing happiness?
Here's a practice that takes about five minutes and a pen.
Finish this sentence as many times as you can, quickly and without editing: I'll be happy when
When I lose the weight. When the business takes off. When I find the right partner. When the children are settled. When I've paid off the mortgage. Write every one that comes.
Now read the list and notice how it feels. Most people feel a little heavy looking at it, because it's a list of all the places they've parked their happiness.
Then pick one item and ask: what would I feel if I achieved this? Name the feeling. Relief. Pride. Freedom. Peace. Security.
Finally, ask the most important question: is there any way to feel even a little of that, right now, before anything changes? Close your eyes and look for it. Usually, a small trace of it is there. That trace is the thing you were really chasing. It was never at the end of the list. It was underneath it.
What makes happiness conditional in the first place?
Old rules, usually learned early.
Some people learned that rest had to be earned. Some learned that feeling good while others were struggling was selfish. Some learned that joy was dangerous, because it was usually followed by disappointment. Those rules, and the emotional charge that holds them in place, are what make happiness feel like something you're only allowed to have later.
When those rules come off, people often find that happiness wasn't something they needed to achieve at all. It was their natural state, underneath the conditions. The freedom is in the removal. You can read how that works in practice on the RS Method page.
Where can I start?
With the one who was happy before the list was written.
I made a free masterclass called Who Am I? It won't give you a new goal. It takes you underneath the goals to the person who doesn't need to earn the right to feel good.
Keep setting goals, if you enjoy them. Just stop asking them to make you happy. That was never their job.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.